/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

package meijuli.com.join51.business.aliyun;

/**
 * <p>
 * Provides the highest level of abstraction for Decoders. This is the sister
 * interface of {@link Encoder}. All Decoders implement this common generic
 * interface.
 * </p>
 * <p>
 * <p>
 * Allows a user to pass a generic Object to any Decoder implementation in the
 * codec package.
 * </p>
 * <p>
 * <p>
 * One of the two interfaces at the center of the codec package.
 * </p>
 *
 * @author Apache Software Foundation
 * @version $Id: Decoder.java 1075404 2011-02-28 16:17:29Z ggregory $
 */
interface Decoder {

    /**
     * Decodes an "encoded" Object and returns a "decoded" Object. Note that the
     * implementation of this interface will try to cast the Object parameter to
     * the specific type expected by a particular Decoder implementation. If a
     * {@link ClassCastException} occurs this decode method will throw a
     * DecoderException.
     *
     * @param source the object to decode
     * @return a 'decoded" object
     * @throws DecoderException a decoder exception can be thrown for any number of reasons.
     *                          Some good candidates are that the parameter passed to this
     *                          method is null, a param cannot be cast to the appropriate
     *                          type for a specific encoder.
     */
    Object decode(Object source) throws Exception;
}